Parallel processing offers a solution to the problem of providing the processing power necessary to help understand and master the complexity of natural phenomena and engineering structures. By taking several basic processing devices and connecting them together the potential exists of achieving a performance many times that of an individual device. However, building parallel application programs is today recognized as a highly complex activity requiring specialist skills and in-depth knowledge. PARLE is an international, European based conference which focuses on the parallel processing subdomain of informatics and information technology. It is intended to become THE European forum for interchange between experts in the parallel processing domain and to attract both industrial and academic participants with a technical programme designedto provide a balance between theory and practice. This volume contains the proceedings of PARLE '93. The PARLE conference came into existence in 1987 as an initiative from the ESPRIT I programme and the format was revised in 1991/92. PARLE '93 is the second conference with the new format and was held in Munich.

This book offers readers a broad view of research in some Western and Eastern European countries on pattern and signal analysis, and on coding, handling and measurement of images. It is a selection of refereed papers from two sources: first, a satellite conference within the biannual International Conference on Pattern Recognition held in Rome, November 14-17, 1988, and second, work done at the International Basic Laboratory on Image Processing and Computer Graphics, Berlin, GDR. The papers are grouped into three sections. The first section contains new proposals for the specific computation of particular features of digital images and the second section is devoted to the introduction and testing of general approaches to the solution of problems met in digital geometry, image coding, feature extraction and object classification. The third section illustrates some recent practical results obtained on real images specifically in character and speech recognition as well as in biomedicine. All the techniques illustrated in this book will find direct application in the near future. This book should interest and stimulate the reader, provoke new thoughts and encourage further research in this widely appealing field.

This volume contains selected papers for the Parcella '88, the Fourth International Workshop on "Parallel Processing by Cellular Automata and Arrays" held in Berlin from October 17 to 21, 1988. The profile of the Parcella workshop series is focused on problems of processing by regular structures, i.e. their "flexibilization" or adapting to "irregular" algorithms and, closely related to this, on the "regularization" of algorithms for their embedding into regular structures. It seems that these problems will have an increasing priority within the list of central problems in parallelization and will determine the profile of Parcella for the next years.